Internet Archive Warrior

The people over at the internet archive have launched a crowd-sourcing tool (the "Warrior") to download and process material from sites that are about to go down. The processing power needed is minimal (it seems to take only a second or two to prepare for upload) and you do upload the content to the archive, so it doesn't require exorbitant amounts of storage and/or turn you into a host for archived content.

The setup is very easy: you just download their virtual machine and run it in VirtualBox or VMware. Instructions for setting it up are here. A leaderboard is available here, but there are currently no teams and there is a different ranking for every project.

It is rather bandwidth-intensive, but I'm running 2 VMs, each of which is set to grab 6 item concurrently (the max for some reason) and I still don't get close to maxing out my 20mbit connection. I average maybe 500kbit/sec on both combined - but sometimes it does briefly jump over 1mbit for a second or two (on a single instance). So peak performance is good, average performance not so much.

If others have used the Warrior, I'd be curious to hear what your experiences are with respect to the download speed. Anything I should be doing to optimize it?